As discussed here last month, the first so-called "smart gun" has now gone on sale in California. Called "smart guns," apparently under the reasoning that calling them "guns that are less likely to fire when the trigger is pulled" was considered bad marketing, the idea is that only "authorized users" can fire them (well, can fire them most of the time, but one should expect them to fail once in the course of firing every magazine). By New Jersey law, that starts a three-year clock ticking in New Jersey, which since 2002 has mandated that within three years of the first "smart gun" going on sale anywhere in the country, only those handguns with the new "feature" will be legal to buy in the state (except by "Only Ones" and other government hired muscle).

The exact circumstances of the retail availability in California of the Armatix iP1 "smart gun" are still a bit hazy at the moment. National Gun Rights Examiner David Codrea made an unexpected discovery while investigating the decidedly curious fact that although the Armatix appears to have hit the market after the date by which every newly approved California-legal handgun would have to have "microstamping" (an entirely separate mandated techno-boondoggle), the Armatix is evidently not so equipped. In the course of looking into that, he found that the Oak Tree Gun Club in Santa Clarita, California, reported by the Washington Post as the sole U.S. retail source of the Armatix, is hotly denying that it carries the "smart gun," or ever has, or intends to ever begin doing so in the future.

That they would want to deny any such relationship is understandable, because that Washington Post article generated a very powerful angry reaction from gun rights advocates across the country. From a follow-up Post article:

The California gun store that put the nation’s first smart gun on sale is facing a furious backlash from customers and gun rights advocates who fear the new technology will encroach on their Second Amendment rights if it becomes mandated.

Attacks in online forums and social networks against the Oak Tree Gun Club have prompted the store to back away from any association with the Armatix iP1 smart gun. The protests threaten the nascent smart gun industry, which received a jolt of support recently when a group of Silicon Valley investors offered a $1 million prize for promising new technology.

In the meantime, though, there is a lesson here that applies equally whether or not Oak Tree has been falsely accused of collaborating with the "smart gun" pushers. That lesson is that gun owners, and more specifically, gun buyers, wield enormous power over the gun industry, and thus enormous capacity to punish collaboration with the forces of "gun control."

Crushing the purveyors of this pernicious technology is vital. For any who doubt that, look at Senator Edward Markey's (D-MA) S. 2068, the "Handgun Trigger Safety Act." A glance at the text reveals that not only does he want to ban sales of new handguns without the technology within two years of the law's enactment, within three years, all pre-"smart" handguns will be robbed of their resale value, because it will become illegal to sell them until they are retrofitted with the technology.

Sen. Markey, apparently in an attempt to assuage gun owners' anger over that abomination, is mandating that the manufacturers of the gun will have to retrofit it for free. In other words, the bill would drive every handgun manufacturer into bankruptcy. Is anyone going to try to argue that this aspect is a bug, and not a feature, in Markey's view?

For now, let's not even bother pointing out how dubious is the notion that such technology could, as the law would require, be particularly difficult to remove or disable, even when built into the design of the gun--and he also wants such a requirement for the retrofitted guns. It's sheer fantasy, but don't worry about that, because even if it were possible, tolerating it would not be.

The rabidly anti-liberty "government monopoly on force" fanatics of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence advocate what they call "counter-marketing"--whereby police forces buy only from manufacturers/retailers, etc., who toe their forcible citizen disarmament extremist line. All the nation's police forces put together, though, don't buy nearly as many guns in a year as America's private citizens--as Smith & Wesson found out, to the company's near demise (forestalled only by a "regime change" in the company).

We can destroy anyone in the gun industry who collaborates with the forcible citizen disarmament lobby and their pet government officials. And we must.

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A former paratrooper, Kurt Hofmann was paralyzed in a car accident in 2002. The helplessness inherent to confinement to a wheelchair prompted him to explore armed self-defense, only to discover that Illinois denies that right, inspiring him to become active in gun rights advocacy. He writes a gun rights blog, called Armed and Safe.